Shall I give you something to cry about ?

It’s enough to make you cry isn’t it? 

Erm, no! 

Today I watched a close friend of mine as they burst into tears; whilst 99% of my attention was focused on comforting her, the remaining percentile was locked in a familiar mantra… ‘Just how does she do that? How lucky she is!’ 

That’s a terrible thing to think isn’t it? It makes me sound so callous; and yet there it is again, I am so jealous of people who can cry.

Things have been pretty grim in my world of late, my love life has slipped beyond the realms of farce into some form of Dadaist performance art. My finances are being threatened by something akin to the writings of Kafka as my madness is of the wrong sort and had left me in the position of being too mad to be capable of proving that I am mad. On top of this, I have been researching the possibility of getting a restraining order out against my family as they are hounding me to the point of distraction. 

What  would dearly love to do right now and for the last few weeks is burst into tears and yet I can’t. It must be a tremendous relief to release all that pent up emotion in floods of tears, but that has been denied to me for so long, since around 1996 to be exact. When my father died it was strictly the mum show and for day after day for years I sat as she poured her grief in my ear, like some sort of toxic sludge, as her need to be the staring act in the bereavement show nullified any opportunity for me to grieve at all. This wasn’t the first time of course, being raised by a parent with undiagnosed and untreated mental health problems had already meant decades of squalor and misery to which I had been a helpless witness. Not being allowed to process and properly grieve for my father was merely the rabbit dropping cherry on the dog shit cake, skilfully iced in dioreah. 

For years I was forced to hold off the grieving process as my parents’ toxic marriage was cognatively reframed as the most heavenly thing ever and, when it was time to turn my own waterworks back on, I found that my tears had completely dried up.

I can produce the odd false tear if I yank a stray hair from my nostril or chop up onions but when it comes to that cathartic flood that comes with the release of pent up emotion… Nothing!

One thought does occur to me though, and that is that, were I able to cry, would I produce any of the art I make?  Would that raw emotion need to come out on paper?  I guess, as the pain keeps coming and the tears clearly don’t, I shall never know.